Ezičimi slavery

[sasasha]

Been reading the Historical Atlas (nice to have a lovely print copy), and it got me wondering about slavery after the Ezičimi conquest of Xengiman.

The word Wede:i became the Axunašin word for slave, but what exactly did this mean to the people who used it, and what did the Ezičimi do with their sudden enormous unhappy workforce?

I'm particularly curious because the Wede:i underclass appears to have disappeared quickly, as offspring with one Ezičimi parent were considered full Ezičimi.

So did the new overlords suddenly stop needing/wanting slaves? Did they get them from somewhere else instead? What happened to the economy/government/labour market (if such things can be said to have existed) to allow a populous enslaved underclass to disappear within a generation, practically as soon as it had appeared?

[zompist]

It wasn't a generation, it was many centuries, for the reasons explained here:

http://www.zompist.com/meshaism.htm#invasion

And even after an equilibrium was reached, a slave underclass of about 10% persisted for centuries more, though it was no longer entirely ethnically Wede:i (see the later section on "the lower orders").

In effect, over time the mass of the people went from slave to serf to peasant. This was better but still, well, not very good.

[sasasha]

I should have guessed that this had long ago been dealt with in detail including a mathematical model for the transition. Thank you! Very interesting and illuminating.

[Nachtswalbe]

This kind of reminds me of the theory that the varna system emerged out of the racial categorization of Dravidian/non-Indo Aryan peoples as a lower class.

[BGMan]

This kind of reminds me of the theory that the varna system emerged out of the racial categorization of Dravidian/non-Indo Aryan peoples as a lower class.

That may have been the case originally, but it doesn't appear today that Indo-Aryan speakers are more likely to be Brahmin or Ksatriya and Dravidian speakers Sudra or Dalit. Ironically, the Dravidian south of India is now wealthier than the Indo-Aryan north on average.